When manufacturing power, telephone, electrical and various other cables or products produced continuously, it is necessary and often desirable to store them by winding them on spools. The spools normally consist of a cylindrical center portion and two side surfaces, hereinafter called flanges, lying substantially perpendicular to the axis of the cylinder. During the winding operation, the spool is normally rotated in one direction and the cable is guided so as to result in a very orderly winding of the cable wherein adjacent turns are as close to one another as possible. The spool is normally turned by a motorize drive while the guiding device of the product can either be controlled manually or by an automatic guide mechanism.
Automatic winding of cables and the like are divided into two groups, the first group being a fixed spool with a moving guide and the second group being a moving spool with a fixed guide. In both of these cases, the relative rotational movement of the winding device is controlled by a variable speed motor to ensure that the spool rotation coupled with the relative displacement of the guide result in a properly wound cable. The guide normally has end of travel stops which serve to reverse the direction of the guide when the cable reaches either end flange.
When manually guiding the cable, the operator tries to obtain as precise a winding as possible without any spacing between the adjacent windings and without any overlap. In the past, this is achieved by manually correcting the position of the guide and/or pitch so that a small overlapping force against the adjacent cable of the preceding turn occurs to insure a tight winding.
The present inventors have observed that the following parameters tend to make automatic winding of cables very difficult. The first being that the spool is not geometrically perfect because the cylinder body may not be exactly centered on the axis of rotation and the flanges may be only imperfectly perpendicular to the axis. Secondly, the start of the cable winding and the change of a winding layer at the flange constitute winding discontinuities which propagate from one turn to the next and often from one layer to the next. Consequently, the pitch of the winding is not always constant and a perfectly wound cable does not have an exact helical form. Because of these variables, winding by advance programming doesn't permit, in many cases, a perfectly wound roll as desired by the cable manufacturer.
The object of the present invention is to control the relative position between the guide and the spool to result in a substantially perfectly wound spool.